I’ve finally got some breathing space to give this blog some love. It’s been crazy busy followed by a vacation and my longest illness as far as I remember (just over 1 week, not too bad I guess 
).
But it looks like I’m able to get quite some cool stuff done in the coming weeks and should have time to do some serious blogging about it. (more…)
During long renders, I’ve been working on a little automation. For a long time I had wanted to make it easier to start up my little render ‘farm’ (just a few machines) and streamline the process of installing new versions of Houdini on them. I had long pushed this effort back using the excuse that one of the machines was still running windows which would require different logic than the other Ubuntu based machines. As the windows machine has since been migrated to Ubuntu as well this excuse was gone…
So while all my machines (including workstation) were very busy rendering, my workstation could just spare enough cycles to run a few terminal windows and a few text editor windows.
As is typical for my ‘internal’ projects, things grew a bit bigger than originally intended 
. The result of this work is a collection of scripts that let me:
As I’m wrapping up another fun project, it is time for some long overdue updates on my blog.
I still haven’t found the time/energy to make that ‘build a wave animation’ screen capture. This is still very much in the planning but I’m going to stop promising it on a concrete schedule as more work is coming up shortly and there is only so much time in a day.
In the mean time, I’ve got some really cool tool development just about to get started, extending my efforts in water/object interactions and bubble advection so far, into a toolset that is able to create some really nice looking splashes and foam effects (both above, on and below the water surface). I’ll be adding the same spray and foam functionality to the breaking wave and ocean displacement tools as well, which should be really cool!
So, plenty to cool stuff on its way!
With a bit of luck I’ll find more time to keep updating the blog in the coming weeks than I have the last month and a half.
Cheers,
Erik
I’ve just finished the first set up of a ‘Projects’ section on my new website. This section contains information on projects I’ve worked on in the past and projects that are ‘in production’ currently.
Looks like the main structure of my new site is more or less there now. Now its time to keep working on the design bit by bit in the in-between hours.
Cheers,
Erik
I’ve just finished a first round of updates to my website in which I’ve added a Sitemap (mostly to help search engines ) and a Tool Development area. This will form a up-to-date (as much as possible) overview of the different tools I’m developing. This makes it a lot easier to get an overview of the current state of any tool. It’s still all very small and a bit rough in terms of layout and wording, but its a start.
Cheers,
Erik
As people that have visited this blog before will probably have noticed some changes to my website. I’ve decided that it is better to continue this website in a more personal note (more like this blog has been from the start). My company Dutch Effects Factory still exists and will continue to be the name with which I’m registered at the chamber of commerce.
However, I’ll be presenting myself as… well myself instead of using my company name. It’s always been a one man company, which I like and hope to continue into the future. It works, keeps overhead low and I think my clients appreciate my personal, no-nonsense, down-to-earth approach to doing business. (more…)